Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici<br />
cases, the researchers were unable to address other issues. The fact that<br />
war took centre-stage in their narratives provides yet more evidence of the<br />
depth and intensity of their experience, as studies on war and memory<br />
remind us. On the other hand, this centrality is probably also due to the<br />
importance of this war in the subsequent construction of a Kosovar-<br />
Albanian collective memory.<br />
The more intense the interviewees’ experience of war, the greater had<br />
become the suffering and distress produced in its wake. The past and its<br />
recollection thus become fused with affliction, grief and anguish. In these<br />
cases, the survivors usually believed it best to forget the events that they<br />
considered traumatic, in order to remove their pain and overcome this<br />
trauma. Such was the situation of Besim.<br />
Besim joined the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) in early 1993 and lived<br />
in a clandestinely for a long time. During the NATO bombings, he was<br />
captured by the Serbian police and was imprisoned for seven months in<br />
Pozharevc (in the former Republic of Yugoslavia). His narration focused<br />
mainly on the time he was in prison. He considered this period his worst<br />
because he was physically and psychologically mistreated, and because of<br />
the anxiety he felt, deprived of news from his family and of the situation<br />
in Kosovo. Besim’s memory of suffering focused on seemingly trivial<br />
details (noises, objects, and dreams), but he emphasized them because they<br />
brought the past into the present. He remembered:<br />
22<br />
When they closed us in, when they closed those iron doors, it affected my<br />
psyche in a way… because there were 400 rooms there, and that means<br />
that 1,200 times a day… because they brought us food three times a day,<br />
so those doors were opened three times a day – 1,200 times… the sound<br />
was such that a grenade explosion would have hurt my ears less… it’s not<br />
just because they could have come inside to beat someone, but also<br />
because of the doors… those iron knobs. […] The doors in my house are<br />
made out of iron, you know, and every time I hear that noise… but I’m<br />
going to take them off and put wooden ones in their place…<br />
To Besim, removing the noise of his doorknobs became a means of removing<br />
this memory, and thus its suffering. This is the same solution that<br />
Blerta, the girlfriend of a former KLA fighter, chose. In her words:<br />
Blerta: Now he is nervous and sometimes he starts to shout without<br />
any reason and he always remembers something that he has<br />
seen before and he starts to tell me about the things he has<br />
seen before.<br />
Question: Do you think it was a relief to him, telling you what he saw<br />
and confessing his feelings to you?<br />
Blerta: Yes, maybe he needs to talk with somebody and to tell that